A process model for controlling project productivity of highway construction operations

Productivity studies in the highway construction industry have been few and far between, even though many research studies on the subject have been conducted in the construction industry. This research has therefore focused on developing a suitable approach for studying productivity on highway construction projects. The researcher reviewed existing models developed for productivity studies to examine whether or not they were appropriate to measure productivity of highway construction operations. Some principles of the models were useful, but none of the principles was applied to measure overall productivity at the project level. They were used only to monitor productivity for just one or two types of work items. However, productivity should be measured not separately but as a whole in order to understand the entire project performance. Therefore, in this research, a process model was developed for measuring and controlling project productivity of highway construction operations. This process model consisted of three basic steps. The objective of the first step was to collect construction field data. The first step included the processes for estimating quantities according to the list of contract pay items, measuring man-hours, and recording considerable disruptive events. The objective of the second step was to establish a qualitative and a quantitative database with the collected data. The second step provided the processes for unifying daily work quantities into a single value, estimating project productivity, and identifying considerable disruptive events. The objective of the third step was to analyze the databases for the purpose of controlling project productivity. The third step involved the processes for analyzing the variation of daily project productivity, quantifying the inefficiency of the input factor, and detecting the sources causing the loss of project productivity. The process model was validated through three case studies. The three basic steps of the process model were applied on three actual highway construction projects awarded by the Florida Department of Transportation. All these projects had a similar scope of work in terms of their construction type and size, but they were located in different classified areas. Two of them were categorized as “urban projects” and the third one was classified as a “rural project. ” This research evaluated the result of the application as being a success.